Just got sidi Ahmed Keeler’s new book today. This will be a fascinating read. I loved Rethinking Islam & The West and this book is a biographical account of what is behind the ideas in that book.

Sidi Ahmed is a really beautiful soul, someone who has a really generous spirit, a very engaging speaker and storyteller, you can sit and listen to him for hours. His writing style is the same, very lucid and engaging.

IN THIS BOOK, Ahmed Paul Keeler recounts an extraordinary life that began in the 1940s with an idyllic childhood in a conservative Christian family in Windsor, and continued with the trauma of an English boarding school education intended to prepare him for running a British Empire that, by the time he left, no longer existed. Life then took him through three years of drama school and the angst of modern theatre, five years’ involvement with the cutting edge of modern art, an immersion in the 60s counterculture and then, through a series of life-changing encounters, led him to embrace Islam.

A born organizer, Keeler was producing plays as a teenager, and in his 20s set up and ran the pioneering Signals Gallery which promoted kinetic art. However, on another scale altogether was his creation of the World of Islam Festival of 1976. Opened by Her Majesty the Queen, this was the largest and most comprehensive cultural event of its kind ever to have taken place in London. Following this success, Keeler initiated and was engaged with various projects relating to Islamic civilization, traditional culture and the environment, the greening of inner cities and the interaction between cultures and civilizations in the pre-industrial age.

At the age of 70, Keeler finally yielded to a friend’s insistence that he should make available to others the knowledge he had gained from such a rich life, by writing a book. The result was Rethinking Islam and the West: a New Narrative for the Age of Crises, a work which questions the modern world’s obsession with progress, and proposes that the true criterion for judging the success of a civilization should be that of mizan or balance. This principle makes it possible to see the history of Islam and the West in an entirely new light.

A Life’s Journey is the companion volume to Rethinking Islam and the West, and tells the intriguing story behind Keeler’s challenging thesis

You can get the new book here https://amzn.to/43wcfJn

You can get Rethinking Islam and the West here https://amzn.to/45Us4Lq

ISLAM AND THE WEST have been neighbours for 1400 years. The West grew up under the shadow of Islam, and then after the Renaissance, in a dramatic reversal of roles, the West became world conquerors and subdued all other cultures and civilisations, including Islam. This transformation ushered in the modern world, a world unlike any that had existed before.

All nations are now judged according to their scientific progress, technological development and economic growth. And yet, humanity is now experiencing multiple crises that are threatening our very existence. Population explosion, financial, social and political instability, the alarming growth of mental illness, the threat of nuclear annihilation and climate change all loom over humanity like a dark cloud. Simultaneously, the world is witnessing a dangerous escalation in the polarisation between Islam and the West.

In this thought-provoking book, we are invited to view the crises we are facing and the tangled relationship between Islam and the West through a different lens. Keeler proposes that the true yardstick for measuring success should be the balance achieved between the spiritual, social and material needs of humanity; a balance which makes it possible to live in harmony with nature. When the world is viewed from this perspective, a completely different picture of Islam and the West emerges.